HELP! Installed some rawhide packages and now system will not boot! [SOLVED]

[Richard Shaw]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 3:22 PM, Richard Shaw <hobbes1069 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well I installed parted/libparted from rawhide to get version 2.3 as I
> was bitten by the resize bug and some other issues with the current
> version in Fedora 12/13. It pulled in a few dependencies and one of
> them broke my system, I'm thinking it was dev-mapper.
>
> On reboot LVM was able to find all 4 of my logical volumes but then
> the boot process fails and I get a message that I need to run e2fsck.
> The actual problem is that for some reason only two of my four LVs are
> showing in /dev/mapper... I booted System Rescue CD and it was able to
> mount the LVs fine and they all checked out clean.
>
> I have the following LVM layout:
>
> VG: vg-hobbes
> LVs: lv-root, lv-var, lv-swap
>
> VG: vg-home (whole disk VG, no dos partition)
> LV: lv-home
>
> Only lv-home and lv-var are showing up in /dev/mapper
>
> My plan at this point is to boot a Fedora LiveCD, mount my LVs and
> chroot to it. I'm hoping rpm and yum will work properly from a
> chroot'ed environment.

The short version is the chroot worked. For those of you who want to
know the gory details read on:

I didn't have any x86_64 boot discs handy so I ended up burning one
from my desktop by booting to my System Rescue CD that I've got
installed on my /boot partition, burning a F13 64bit install DVD and
booting it into rescue mode.

After that I:
- chroot'd to /mnt/sysimage which rescue mode automatically mounts
your existing file system. If you don't use a Rescue mode you'll have
to do that part manually.
- figured out what the offending packages were by 'grep fc14
/var/log/yum.log > fc14_packages.txt'
- Edited the resulting file removing everything but the base package name
- Did a "yum downgrade `cat fc14_packages.txt`"
- (probable unnecessary steps) exited the chroot and did a 'sync'
- Rebooted

On the first reboot it wanted to so a selinux relabel on the whole
file system. Not sure why.. but everything came up normally on the
second reboot!

Next time I try packages from rawhide I think I'll setup a LVM
snapshot first although I think I still would have to boot to a Rescue
disk or other Live system to drop the snapshot and I'm not sure if
snapshot merging is available yet in Fedora.

Richard

Richard